Power to the People

Why is John Gage, a bearded old Berkeley troublemaker, carrying the corporate flag for the Pentagon's favorite computer maker?

From the workaday sprawl of San Francisco's East Bay, the Dumbarton Bridge zips you over 5 miles of open water and plunges you into Silicon Valley's shimmering haze of possibility. John Gage, director of the science office at Sun Microsystems, is racing his 20-year-old Volvo wagon across the long low span toward Palo Alto. He's an hour late for lunch with a London-based media minimogul who wants Sun's help with a project to digitally archive ancient history. In the back of the car is a jumble of boxes, the detritus from a demo Gage did a month ago for the programming language Java.

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Gage has been talking nonstop since I arrived in his Berkeley kitchen two hours earlier. Almost never with me. A whizzy Motorola cell phone is his office (in a good month, he manages just a few scattered hours at his desk at Sun's headquarters in Mountain View), and it rarely stops ringing. As we pull out of his driveway, someone from Sun's Mideast sales office calls. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak is in Washington, DC. Can the White House nudge Mubarak to back an Egyptian version of NetDay, a pet project Gage is pushing to wire the world's schools? Thirty seconds later, Gage has Al Gore's office on the line.

The phone rings again. It's Gage's secretary – his "admin," in Sun speak – relaying a message. Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad wants another meeting of his special advisory group on building a best-in-the-world national information infrastructure. Next week. Gage tells the admin to book the ticket: round-trip San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur, one night in a hotel, then straight back.

I've spent enough time trailing Gage to know this performance is not simply for my benefit. This is how one of the marquee names on the high tech rubber-chicken circuit operates. For a 1992 company meeting, Sun chief network officer Geoff Baehr built an "electronic leash" – a laptop PC, Global Positioning System locator, and cellular modem – to automatically report Gage's whereabouts every five minutes to a wall map of the US labeled "Where Is John Gage?" No one was surprised when Gage lost the contraption three days later.

A couple of years ago, Sun trademarked the Silicon Valley truism: "The Network Is the Computer." And in a very real sense, John Gage is the network – or at least a web of information, ideas, and influence linking him with just about anyone, and anything, worth knowing in the exploding high tech universe. Like the Net, Gage reflexively connects concepts, people, something he read in an in-flight magazine, a conversation he had with Sun cofounder Bill Joy over beers in Aspen at 3 a.m. He exudes boundless possibility. He can route around problems. And he's one of the best-known assets of what remains the hippest, geekiest big-time company in Silicon Valley.

Again, the phone. This time it's someone from UC Berkeley's world-renowned advanced mathematics research institute. The National Science Foundation, under budget pressure from Congress, will cut funding. This is close to Gage's heart. He's been part of the Berkeley scene since 1960, first as a crew-cut swim jock and math major, later on the front lines of the history-making fights for free speech and against the Vietnam War. After 36 long, strange years, he's still there, in a nice turn-of-the-century house not far from College Avenue. He tells the caller he'll see what he can do.

Finally, there's a moment's quiet, and while Gage fumbles for toll money, I get my shot. Here's a man who blew off college to join the political circus, who made the Nixon White House "enemies" list (there's an old San Francisco Chronicle clip in his upstairs hall), who carried a stone-drunk Janis Joplin through a quarter mile of sticky Florida mud to keep a rock-and-roll benefit concert going, and who baby-sat Hunter Thompson on George McGovern's presidential campaign press bus.

Forget about getting a life – Gage has already had one. So why does a bearded old (well, 54, anyway) Berkeley troublemaker carry the corporate flag for the Pentagon's favorite computer maker at places like the National Security Agency, the Soviet Space and Missile Command, and Los Alamos National Laboratory? To quote networking's favorite phrase: What's the connection?

"Information," Gage answers, matter-of-factly. "What stopped the Vietnam War was that we told the truth about what was happening. Today, the truth-telling mechanisms that we can put in people's hands are a million times more powerful," he says, wending through the ghetto fringe of East Palo Alto. "And when every person on the planet has access to that power – which is what I'm trying to do – then watch what happens."

Some of us are born to make money. Some are born to perfect the 3,000-MHz chip. And some of us – John Gage, for one – are missionaries. He's a man with a cause, whether it's stopping a war, bashing Microsoft, or wiring the world. And he's been an evangelist longer than a lot of Silicon Valley people have been alive.

Power to the network! Right on.

Science fiction officer

Buried in a file cabinet somewhere at Sun's headquarters, there's a sheet of paper describing the position of Director, Science Office, Sun Microsystems. Gage wrote it when he created the job a decade ago. His duties: "Find the world's smartest people, talk to them about what they're doing, and see how Sun can help."

It's not a bad description until you consider that Gage is not a scientist, unless you count an almost-PhD in mathematical economics. He's not an engineer or a programmer, the other two Silicon Valley job categories with serious professional throw weight. Sun's "Science Office" consists of Gage and a part-time admin. "Science fiction is more like it," jokes Gage's boss, Sun CEO Scott McNealy.

McNealy can afford the humor because Sun is a US$7 billion company on the way to another record year. Gage has managed to make himself (and, indirectly, Sun) ubiquitous – to use a word of the digital moment – at precisely the point computer networking has jumped from the geek-driven basement to center stage. It's impossible to quantify what he does to boost Sun's (eminently healthy) bottom line. He's not a salesman or a marketing guy. And he'll never come close to any of Silicon Valley's favorite titles: CEO, CIO, CTO. But if you're anybody who's anybody in cyberspace, you know him. And if you've gone to a high tech conference or convention in the last five years, it's a good bet you've seen him in the spotlight.

Gage maintains a schedule that would exhaust a man half his age. A typical month might find him off to Rio to preach networking to the stodgy mandarins of the International Telecommunication Union. Then he jumps over to Cairo for a little sitdown about digital technology with the Egyptian army's general staff. After that's wrapped up, he's scaring the wits out of a key subcommittee of the US Congress with a pointed little demo on the weaknesses of cellular telephone security. Then he'll chat with the rector of Moscow State University about putting top Russian mathematicians to work testing a theoretical Net a million times bigger than today's. Mix in maybe 100 assorted speeches and panel discussions a year, plus a dozen keynote addresses to the digitally anointed, and you get an idea of what it means to be personally distributed. McNealy again: "Does John know everything, or just everyone? I can't remember."

As Silicon Valley has gone public, lots of companies have hired "evangelists" to hawk the company line. The difference is that Gage, fired up by 1960s Berkeley politics, profoundly believes in what he preaches. He envisions the promised land as a totally networked world where information runs like water, over open, nonproprietary operating systems. And he has seen the keys to the kingdom: cheap, powerful computers linked by fiber-optic cable and bright strands of high-bandwidth Category Five wire. "We can make all of the power of the technology available to everyone," he says. The network is god. Or at least our salvation.

A year ago, Gage talked Sun into letting him push that vision with NetDay, a volunteer campaign started in California with the modest goal of wiring the whole world's schools. Having Bill Clinton, an old coworker from the McGovern campaign, turn out to pull some special red, white, and blue Cat Five wire didn't hurt. But for Gage, NetDay and its cast of thousands is a battle, not the war. The real cause is a fantasy straight out of the 1969 March on Washington: a completely networked society where free speech stops wars, the CIA becomes irrelevant, and the good guys get the White House. Berkeley meets Silicon Valley.

Unlike the majority of his high tech colleagues, Gage doesn't turn up his nose at politics. "John's what anthropologists would call a shaman," says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. "He's someone with a foot in two different worlds. In the Valley, Gage looks like a policy guy. But to political people, he looks like a high tech guy. But the fact is that he's really a social engineer – he knows how to hack human systems."

In more than just a poetic sense, Gage embodies the Net. He is a universal connection machine – ubiquitous, free, and open. He is "a thousand fingers, stuck into a thousand pies," says James Gosling, one of Sun's Distinguished Engineers and the principal author of Java's code. Gosling tells this story of a Gage encounter: "Back when we were getting HotJava, the browser, ready for release, John turns up one day and starts packing cables and monitors, generally scrounging stuff. So I ask him what he's doing. Says John: 'I'm doing the keynote at the TED conference tomorrow and I need something to show.'

"Once John gets going he's a pretty immovable object. So I realize I had better get in the car with him and go. As we drove down to Monterey, he became less and less coherent. It was like a bunch of kid's blocks, thrown in the air. That's how random the phrases were coming out. The Internet connection at the hotel was a nightmare. The network kept going down. I was up all night fixing it. And then 30 seconds before we're supposed to start, the problems just stopped. And he was brilliant. That's John – 24 hours from throwing random junk into the back of his station wagon to an absolutely flawless performance."

Says McNealy: "John is what I call randomly hardwired. To try to reconfigure him into something more methodical would ultimately wind up destroying the whole thing."

Bill Joy recounts another Gage story – everyone seems to have one. "John and I were flying to Beijing," Joy says, "and he shows up at the airport in San Francisco with his John Gage bags – the biggest carry-ons you've ever seen. Duffel bags, no interior dividers, packed to absolute maximum density. There was engine trouble, the flight took forever, but we sat there and John just kept pulling interesting stuff out of those bags; there must have been a thousand things in there – papers, books, articles. I don't think we ever slept. And this was maybe two of the piles from his house."

Turn on, tune in, assimilate, connect. John Gage is a network, and the network is John Gage.

See ya later, agitator

It's a hot summer weekend, and Gage is in Washington, DC, for the launch of NetDay '96, a nationwide follow-up to the wire-the-schools event held in California in March. Clinton can't make it, but Gore and FCC chair Reed Hundt are on their way over to bestow a White House blessing. In the meantime, Gage – who spent the early morning frantically trying to get all the AV gear up and running – is warming up 300 prospective NetDay organizers from around the country.

In his trademark podium voice – think Vietnam moratorium organizer crossed with Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars – Gage works the crowd. He's smooth, liquid, convincing. "This mechanism, the Net, has never existed before, but it's wonderfully powerful," he says. As proof, he reports that 100,000 people throughout California participated in NetDay. "They can't all be up on ladders, pulling wire," says Gage. "But how about scrubbing the bathrooms? And for the first time, a lot of people actually saw what the schools were like. Now that's an interesting educational experience."

Gage's history notwithstanding – he's still very much a registered Democrat – he's studiously agnostic about partisan efforts to grab the digital high ground. "I went to a meeting in Atlanta," he says, "where Newt Gingrich had assembled some of his people – guys with dollar signs on their ties and all – to discuss the impact of the new technologies. At one point he said: 'The issues that we will use to beat the Democrats in the next election are unfortunately not the issues on which we can build the United States of the 21st century.' At least he's being honest. Most Democrats won't go that far."

NetDay is designed to be an end run around the whole process. And it's pure Gage, equal parts inevitability and vapor – get out the digital megaphone, pull everyone in for a brief burst of activity, then strike the virtual tents and move on. "It's the fundamental principle of organizing," he says. "You're not organizing things – you're giving people the tools to organize themselves."

Listen to his power-to-the-people message and you could wonder what decade you're in. It's not surprising. There's some old TV news footage, shot in 1964 at the outdoor Greek Theatre in Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement. A squad of police has just pulled firebrand Mario Savio from the podium. The crowd is on its feet, screaming. Suddenly across the stage, unmistakable in his "Big C" university letter sweater, dashes 21-year-old All-American swimmer John Gage, former high school class president, honors math student, and all-around good kid from Newport Beach, California. "I had this crazy idea," he remembers, "that if I just talked to the cops, they'd see what a bad idea this really was." Instead, they slammed an elevator door in his face.

But unlike some of his classmates, Gage was an organizer, not a rock thrower. He ran a volunteer program to get Berkeley students into the nearby Oakland ghetto, then brought his Rolodex along for Bobby Kennedy's tragic campaign. As an official Kennedy delegate, he was safely inside the Chicago convention hall when the city's streets exploded in 1968. He helped stage-manage a string of huge antiwar marches, in Washington and elsewhere, while at Harvard Business School on a scholarship. Then he bounced to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before vaulting out to a job as deputy national press secretary for the McGovern campaign. "Remember Timothy Crouse's book The Boys on the Bus?" Gage asks. "That was my bus."

The McGovern dream – and most of the political network that went with it – crashed in November 1972. Gage retreated to Berkeley, first to finish what was by then a 12-year-old bachelor's degree, then to burrow into graduate studies in mathematical economics.

Had he applied himself, Gage might have ended up on the faculty somewhere, a cranky liberal writing monographs and signing petitions. Instead he connected with Joy, an intense young computer science graduate student working on networked minicomputers to typeset the kinds of complex mathematical equations Gage was studying – a job that, until then, only big, expensive mainframes could do. Joy had written an operating system that could network any computer into a virtual mainframe.

Free and nonproprietary, what came to be known as Berkeley Unix was the high tech equivalent of a free-speech manifesto – and potentially just as political. Gage and Joy made an instant hyperlink. "Bill pushes out the technical limits," Gage says. "And then I'll think of ways to apply that to human organizations."

But to connect the world, you needed a new machine. "The dream was for everyone to have their own machine, with plenty of power," Gage remembers. And in the early '80s, the first of the cheap, powerful silicon chips that would make that possible started arriving, just in time to get Gage's populist heart beating again. "Joy grabbed me one day and we went across the street to the Café Mediterraneum, one of the oldest places in Berkeley," Gage says. "And sitting out there where Black Panther leader Bobby Seale used to sit, he drew out on a napkin what the new machines would look like."

Sun Microsystems was founded in February 1982, in a garage in Santa Clara, California. It would exploit Berkeley Unix and the cheap power of new microprocessors to challenge the corporate computing establishment. Gage came aboard two months later, as employee 21, to help stage-manage the revolution. "No one with a country-club membership and kids in college was going to leave DEC or IBM for a start-up based on open computing," Gage says. "Giving away your source code, for god's sake!" Not to mention the futon on the floor.

Gage had a phone and a desk on which hundreds of pink message slips from prospective customers around the world were lined up by time zones. "What no one understood was that there was this community out there, and the things basically sold themselves – a $30,000 machine that took the place of a million-dollar mainframe. And we'd come from Berkeley, remember, where we'd been giving away Unix source code to anyone. So I knew where to find everyone who thought the same way we did. We booked $15 million in our first year."

There were some bumps on Gage's new corporate path. In the early days at Sun he filed a year's worth of expenses at once, forcing the company to restate the earnings figures in its annual report. But Sun workstations soon dominated all the big university computer science departments, Los Alamos, Livermore, the air force, the intelligence agencies, and national laboratories around the world – "anyplace people wanted a system where they could go in and change things themselves," Gage says. With Apple and IBM making a similar push on the lower-end PC front, the revolution that killed the mainframe and opened the way to today's Net was under way.

Smart agent

The mainframe may be dead, but the revolution trumpeted by Gage still has enemies. At Sun, open systems isn't negotiable. It isn't just one side of a debate – it's a religion. And the devil is a little company based in Redmond, Washington, that has done rather well selling closed, proprietary software.

Having made his peace with the Pentagon, this fight is Gage's new holy war. "For John, it's Berkeley in the 1960s all over again," says one Sun colleague. "Microsoft is the Pentagon, and Bill Gates is General Westmoreland."

Over drinks at a conference in Philadelphia this summer, Gage told a nodding group of Bell Labs researchers: "Sure, there are some decent, intelligent people at Microsoft. It's the system there that forces them to make bad software." But that's just a warm-up. "If DOS is an engineering crime," he says with a smile, "doesn't that makes Bill Gates the richest criminal in the world?" Everyone laughs.

Keeping Sun's best and brightest employees engaged, informed, and amused is a Gage task, too. "As the one who gets around the most, it's part of my job to keep the smartest people at Sun thinking, talking, and working together. We have 16,000 employees now, more than Microsoft. The bigger we get, the harder that job becomes."

What that mostly means is the care and feeding of Sun's cadre of Distinguished Engineers, veterans like Gosling and graphics wizard Michael Deering – the one working with Gage's lunch date from London on a virtual chariot ride through ancient Rome – who are charged with pursuing ideas off the main corporate path.

"The problem," Gage says, "is that these guys see what's coming three, four, five years from now. But if they try to speak to a product manager who's got a product that has to ship in the next six months, they can't communicate. My job is to listen, help them formulate their idea, and then make sure it gets heard." Once again, Gage is the network.

Patrick Naughton, a hot young engineer who left Sun two years ago, credits Gage with keeping him – and the project that eventually produced Java – afloat when heavy corporate winds were blowing against it. "John was always stopping by," says Naughton, who finally left to become chief technical officer at Starwave, an ambitious Internet start-up in Bellevue, Washington. "He was our biggest backer, and also our biggest nightmare – he kept telling everybody what we were doing." But what else does an open network do?

Like a lot of good netheads, Gage can completely lose himself in the moment. "Whatever John's doing at any given moment – and that could mean talking to a 6-year-old kid – is the most important thing in the world," says Liz Kniss, a marketing person in SunLabs who has been working with Gage on the NetDay project. "But that's not the way the tech world typically operates."

Which is fine by him. On a recent evening just after midnight, Gage walked out of the Los Angeles Times building and into the nearly deserted street. He'd spent most of the night bending ears in the newsroom about California NetDay, which was less than a month away.

On the way to the car, he spots two men pulling lines of cable though an open manhole. Was it single or multimode fiber? He walks over for a look, and soon he's grilling a baffled electrician. What's the capacity? What are they replacing? Gage is horrendously late again. He has already missed his plane, but he's on to the next manhole, another guy, more questions. There's a third guy, 50 feet away. He's pushing the cable. Why is he pushing the cable?

Gage is networking. He's linking. He's surfing the moment and its serendipitous greatness. "The cable those guys are installing has enough bandwidth," Gage says, half-seriously outraged, "to take every word that's ever written or spoken inside that newspaper building and transmit it around the world. At the speed of light. Almost. At practically zero cost. Anywhere on the planet. The entire structure of what that newspaper does is changing, literally under people's feet. And no one has noticed."

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